The video game era is here. All hail the video game era.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s newly minted Filmstacker :

Speaking of video games, that was my overwhelming takeaway from CinemaCon—they’re not only the new superhero for studios, they’re the new Everything […] This is not only the vanguard of studio filmmaking, it’s easily the most untapped resource given the 40-plus-year history of gaming.

Sounds grim, right? Just as superheroes hit the limits of their powers, studios find another source of IP to shove through the sausage factory. There is the unmistakable stench of butts-in-seats cynicism to the whole affair. One Intellectual Property After Another.

It’s less bad than you think. Actually, that’s a hedge. I’ll rephrase. It’s good.

Studios have always followed the money. Westerns, musicals, slashers, historical epics, young adult dystopias: Hollywood history is littered with the bones of genres once enthusiastically embraced by the industry’s powerbrokers.

Today, the pivot revolves around IP and brand identity rather than story and genre. Hence the cynicism. But that’s the world we’re stuck with. Rather than comparing this latest development to a mythical ideal of artistically motivated studio filmmaking, isn’t it better to compare it to, I don’t know, the world we’ve actually been living in for the last 10+ years?

If I had to choose between a world where superheroes are the “vanguard of studio filmmaking” and a world where video game movies fulfil the same function, I’d choose the latter.

Superhero movies tend to be narratively constrained. There is someone out to achieve something nefarious, and someone out to stop them. There are fights. There are origin stories. Occasionally, the film may set out to subvert expectations, usually by having its hero act in a villainous way or do something absolutely mental like SWEAR AND HAVE SEX. There’s scope for tonal variety, but, in the grand scheme of things, the possibility space is pretty limited.

Video game movies aren’t constrained in this way, because the source material isn’t. An Untitled Goose Game movie will have different thematic preoccupations to Bioshock. There is next-to-no common DNA between Portal and The Sims.

In the video game era, big-budget studio filmmaking has the potential to be way more diverse than the preceding era in terms of tone, genre and theme (I’m told that, in the spiritual wasteland otherwise known as “television,” we already have a couple of artistically bold video game adaptations in The Last of Us and Fallout).

Of course, potential is not the same as reality. To date, video game movies have largely been slop. If the video game era is the Super Mario Galaxy era then you have my permission to moan.

But slop will always find a way. I’m more interested in how the talented filmmakers who want studio resources can get them. For years, indie up-and-comers and established names looking for a fun paycheck had to use superhero films as their golden ticket to the big leagues (just ask Taika Waititi, Shane Black, Sam Raimi, Patty Jenkins and Jon Watts). No longer! Now, Alex Garland can summon a $100m budget for a dark fantasy epic. Zach Cregger can secure $80m to make ‘Fury Road with zombies.’

There are some auteurs I don’t want touching this stuff. If Paul Thomas Anderson announces he is making an Angry Birds Movie, I’ll have a couple of concerns. But if, hypothetically, glomming onto Kingdom Come Deliverance would let someone like Oliver Laxe make a gnarly medieval action flick, great! If JT Molner wanted to leverage Ghost of Tsushima to make a samurai revenge picture, have at it!

Video game stories, with a few notable exceptions, are rarely treated with the reverence that superhero canon is. That makes for a much bigger creative sandbox. The best case scenario for the video game era is that we’ll see a wave of savvy filmmakers securing studio backing with recognisable IP and using it to take some wild swings. Rather than moaning, this is the future we should be advocating for.

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Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Cinephile’s Bookshelf. In this new series, I hunt down rare, out-of-print and obscure film books and excavate their secrets. Today, we add our very first book to the shelf: Raymond Fielding’s The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography.

The Hunt

Visual effects wizard Phil Tippett describes first discovering The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography in a San Diego library:

It explained all of the techniques that you ever wanted to know up to that particular time, from the beginning of film history until the mid-sixties […] And so I stole this book. I stole it! Nobody ever checked it out. I don’t know how long it had been there. I took it home, and I read it from cover to cover many times.

Tippett wasn’t alone. The book was something of a sacred text in the latter half of the 20th century, detailing the arcane methods special effects technicians used to create convincing movie illusions.1

After seeing the book referenced a few times, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Alas, no copy was within stealing distance, so I started hunting. An early foray on Amazon was rebuffed: the book was on there, but for the princely sum of £154. I retreated.

Next, I turned to AbeBooks, where multiple copies were available for under £20. BUT WAIT! These were third editions (1972), not fourth editions (1985). That thirteen-year gap straddles a small, underseen arthouse film called “Star Wars,” which Mr Tippett happened to work on:

The story could stop here. But many years later, at the end of the eighties or in the early nineties, the book was reissued. The original was in black and white, and the new edition had a bunch of color pictures in it. It was updated. And among these pictures, you could see photos of me animating the AT-AT walker in Empire Strikes Back. I was in it!

This settled it. I needed to get the fourth edition. Eventually, I pulled the trigger on a nice-looking ex-library copy on eBay for a reasonable £30.

The Book

The book is quite handsome in a rugged, weatherbeaten kind of way. It has that no-nonsense, dust-jacket-free hardback binding style that would happily endure being bapped around for days on end in a student’s backpack. Funnily enough, that’s pretty much been what’s been happening to it: I’ve been lugging it around with me everywhere in anticipation of writing this post.

The Secrets

(A quick note here on the format for this series (this is the inaugural edition after all). I’m not going to try to summarise the books. That would be boring for me to write and even more boring for you to read. Instead, for each book, I will tease out a few surprising ideas that somehow change how I think about cinema today, and that I think you will find interesting. Over time, as we build our bookshelf, we should see these books begin to speak to each other in ways that lead us to unexpected places. Fun!)

In many ways, The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography is a tricky book to launch this series with. It is, first and foremost, a textbook: heavy on detail and procedure, light on argument or anecdote. I confess to skimming some of the more labourious sections on largely defunct technical processes (don’t quiz me on camera-light-tight boxes, power drives, or registration methods).

From today’s vantage point, though, this dry, technical handbook is laced with an almost wistful sadness. The techniques discussed range from the dead to the dying and have largely been replaced by digital alternatives. Reading it now resembles attending a Rolling Stones concert in 2026. It’s fun to sing along with the hits, but everyone knows it’s a nostalgia act.

Contrived analogy aside, this tension between how and why special effects were utilised then versus now is exactly what gives the book its vitality. Which leads me to…

(1) Special Effects Were Supposed to Save Money

At every opportunity, Fielding hammers home a simple point. Special effects were conceived first and foremost as a cost-saving tool.

This may seem obvious in hindsight. Today, though, it’s quite striking. If someone told me that a film is “special effects heavy,” the first thing I’d think of wouldn’t be “cheap” or “efficient.” I’d assume the opposite.

Of course, the cost-saving function of special effects hasn’t disappeared. Many a low-budget filmmaker has used special effects (both practical and digital) to punch well above their weight. But, more frequently, we hear of expensive commercial blockbusters with frankly insane effects budgets. What gives?

The answer, I think, is that the function of special effects has bifurcated. The special effects Fielding covers in the book were first conceived to enable filmmakers to substitute reality. A matte shot could cheaply replace a cityscape; a miniature could substitute for a location shoot, etc.

This purpose still exists, albeit now largely fulfilled digitally rather than manually. But a new tradition has emerged. As special effects evolved into digital and visual effects, and as the industry’s imagination was captured by large, spectacle-driven genre pieces, the technology began to be used to create rather than substitute for reality.

Ambition scaled with the technology, resulting in fantastical (and expensive) creations that have no real-world stand-in. The ‘effects picture’ became an end in its own right, crowding out the cost-saving logic that emerged in the first place. As Fielding declares on the book’s back cover:

“Once intended to save money, special effects films have now developed into the dominant motion picture genre.”

(2) The Economic Logic of Special Effects

There is a romanticism to the techniques discussed in the book. Fielding writes of skilled artists painstakingly painting intricate church scenes onto fragile panes of glass; of miniatures built to mathematically precise dimensions.

There’s nothing wrong with this cosy, Noble Craftsman nostalgia, but we should temper it with the economic reality:

To paraphrase Fielding’s argument, certain special effects techniques were adopted because they moved work off the expensive, time-pressured set into a cheaper, less labour-intensive post-production environment. Artisanal skill was a byproduct of this economic logic.

This same economic logic drove the widespread adoption of digital tools a few years after the book’s publication. And today, this logic has reached its apotheosis. Companies make grand promises that individual creators, armed with nothing but a laptop screen, can produce entire worlds for little cost with a click of their fingers.

Maybe they’re right. But the book, taken as a whole, is an argument for what may be lost when friction is removed entirely…

(3) Not All Friction is Born Equal

There are two kinds of friction. One is creatively generative, the other is plain labourious. The great challenge in our increasingly frictionless age will be to retain friction where it is creatively beneficial.

For example, early sections of the book spend a lot of time exploring glass shots. One of the earliest special effects techniques (first used in 1907), these required someone to paint missing elements of a scene onto glass. The shot would then be filmed through the glass, resulting in a composite image of the real world plus the painted-on elements:

This is extremely impressive. It is also extremely slow. I’m sorry to the humble 20th-century glass painter whose livelihood I’m about to casually dismiss, but the replication of this skill with digital equivalents seems to me like an upgrade. If the function is to accurately represent a missing element of a scene, then a digital process that achieves that result more quickly and cheaply is a good example of eliminating ‘bad’ friction.

Then we have miniatures. These are so cool! Did you know there is a precise mathematical formula that dictates the camera speed used to record gravity’s impact on a model? Or that they are always built as large as possible (one tanker used in The Spy Who Loved Me was 63 feet long!)? Or that each model designed to be photographed further back in the frame must be built with progressively less detail in proportion to its reduction in scale?

If this all sounds complicated, it’s because it is. Fielding hammers home over and over again how inefficient, difficult and time-consuming miniatures are:

He argues that convincing miniature work involves a persistently frustrating uphill battle against the laws of physics. Though this process is stubborn and slow, when done well, it yields phenomenal results.

There is, for the record, no reason this effect isn’t possible to achieve digitally, and no reason that certain painful elements of the process (eg the calculation of the relevant formula) can’t be smoothed away. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that the mode of weightless and artificial CGI we encounter in many blockbusters today is connected to the smoothing away of the bloody, real-world problem-solving that miniatures and other forms of practical special-effects require. Sometimes it’s supposed to be hard!

The Bonus

Thanks for tuning into this first instalment. I’m still working on the format - I feel this edition may have been a little too long and dense in the middle sections. But hopefully you’ve liked what you’ve seen. Next time, we’ll add Parker Tyler’s Underground Film: A Critical History to the shelf: an entertaining, insightful and eyebleedingly convoluted polemic on underground film and the avant-garde.

As a final bonus, here’s some competency porn, in the form of diagrams I’ve scanned from the book. The skill, intelligence and practice required to pull off these techniques is so cool, akin to watching a great sports team or band in their pomp. Enjoy!

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Stop moaning. Don’t be a cynic. Don’t indulge the cynics. Study acting. Study form. Study editing. Explore animation. Distinguish schlock from slop. Read interviews. Read modern critics. Read classic critics. Fight nostalgia. Respect the canon. Fuck the canon. Pinpoint tone. Take notes. Read Bordwell. Be wrong. Change your mind. Change it back. Be a nerd. Be an aesthete. Be a snob. Be a populist. Keep writing.

Make the time. Stop watching television. Stop playing Xbox. Ignore awards. Listen to soundtracks. Have a watchlist. Find community. Collaborate. Proselytize. Persuade. Make trade-offs. Don’t comment on commentary. Support your local cinema. Upgrade your home set-up. Rewatch. Cherish your favourites. Be genre blind. Be a genre obsessive. Go to the cinema alone. Go to the cinema late at night. Find a bigger screen. Find a louder sound system. Write. Write. Write.

For some strange, cosmic reason, this still-young Frankenstein’s monster of an art form has chosen us to be its acolytes.

We can’t choose our passions, but we can choose what we do with them. Don’t waste the gift of obsession.

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American cinema has long flip-flopped between revealing the world as it is and the world as it wants it to be.

Certain eras retreat into wish-fulfilment. The Reaganite 1980s unleashed a wave of ‘roided-up bodybuilders on enemies home and abroad. America was back, baby: bigger, meaner, and manlier than ever. Following the War on Terror, studios fed us morally straightforward fantasies of spandex-wearing heroes solving our problems with a wink, a quip and a well-timed punch.

Other eras are more cold-eyed. Historically, when cinema has been most culturally virile, it has produced tight, thematically cohesive, fiercely contemporary clusters that diagnose the anxieties of the current moment.

In the aftermath of Watergate, the New Hollywood spat out tales of angry, suspicious men being crushed by vast conspiratorial systems, whether the government, the mob, or the family (The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, The Conversation, Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor). The late 1990s introduced a series of passive, emasculated office drones flailing against the crushing weight of corporate mediocrity (Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, The Matrix, Office Space).

This push-and-pull between confrontation and retreat is a feature of cinema, not a bug. Movies are made of flesh and blood. Behind every film are dozens, hundreds, thousands of imperfect humans, each bringing their own hopes, fears, and preoccupations. They’re made by institutions, too: companies, nonprofits, and governments with mandates to fill, stakeholders to satisfy, and markets to please. Every movie reveals something about the world it was made in.

I am resolutely not one of the “cinema is dying” crowd. There have been hundreds of incredible, important movies in my adult life. I could solely watch 2010-2025 cinema for the next 30 years and still be finding cool new stuff in my sixties.

But for all the individual high points of the last 15 years, the medium as a whole has been losing contact with reality. At its best, cinema functions as a cultural antibody: a mirror to, rather than an escape from, society at large. In recent years, the dominant preoccupation has instead been wish-fulfilment, expressed through superhero fantasies, hermetically sealed character studies, and the retreat of auteurs to period pieces (no, smartphones aren’t an excuse).

There are a couple of obvious exceptions, but neither of them quite scratches my historical itch.

First, “Eat the Rich” (Parasite, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, Ready or Not). This is a cluster of thematically aligned films, yes. But it reads as escapism. "Rich People Are Bad, So Let’s Laugh At/Punish/Expose Them” isn’t a provocative thesis. Eat the Rich is to the financial crisis as superheroes are to the War on Terror: a retreat to moral simplicity and wish fulfilment in the face of forces we don’t understand.

Second, Elevated Horror. On the “world as it is vs world as you want it to be” scale, Elevated Horror sits firmly in the former’s camp (unless the world you want involves being possessed by a trickster demon). But though the trauma-coded language of Elevated Horror was new, its thematic preoccupations - psychological implosion, the sins of the father, grief - weren’t. With some exceptions (e.g. Get Out), these movies were more attempts to reflect eternal human truths than cohesive statements on the cultural moment.

Which brings us to 2025. When historians look back at 1970s cinema, they see a society processing the collective trauma of Watergate and Vietnam. When they look at 1999, they see one grappling with corporate alienation and the spiritual exhaustion of office life. In 20 years, when they look back at Eddington, Bugonia, One Battle After Another, House of Dynamite, Weapons, Cloud, It Was Just An Accident, No Other Choice, and 2024’s Civil War, they’ll see a culture grappling with the post-social media, post-COVID, post-AI collapse of shared reality.

Are you an American? Are you an alien? Are you my father? Were you my torturer? Do I have a job? Why do you hate me? Is there a nuke? Are you my enemy? Is COVID real?

These are the questions haunting the 2025 canon. Consensus truth has dissolved. Trust in institutions has collapsed. Conspiratorial thinking reigns.

These are films soaked in disorientation and anxiety; in a sense of existential confusion about a world changing in ways their characters don’t understand. Importantly, they are all set in or around the present day. They even feature smartphones and social media!

For the first time in years, cinema is behaving like a cultural antibody again. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but so was Fight Club and The Conversation. Perversely, I read these movies’ cynicism as optimism. What is art for if not to help us process times of immense change? That movies still can be an outlet for our hopes and fears is a sign that the medium still has a role in our future.

As to where that immense change leads? I’ll leave that one to the historians.

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Hello friends

MOVIES ARE DYING!

If you’re sick of reading that headline, you’re not alone. That same frustration is what led me to write today’s piece.

Seventy years ago, this same panic consumed Hollywood. With the dawn of television, movies were supposed to be dead, extinct, kaput.

Spoiler: they weren’t. Yes, they changed enormously. Not always for the better. But the impact of television was way weirder, more diffuse and more interesting than anyone predicted.

Today, streaming is supposedly finishing what television started. But if history tells us anything, it’s that we should think twice before declaring the death of cinema.

This essay is about what actually happened the last time something “killed” the movies.

I. The Battle of the Smellies

December 2, 1959. Something is brewing in the bowels of the DeMille theatre.

Cufflinks, diamonds and champagne. On screen: Behind the Great Wall, the first feature-length documentary by a Western director in China. An afterthought.

Tiger hunts and orange slices. A fisherman’s jet-black bird retrieves an unsuspecting salmon; the crowd mumbles their approval.

Then: it’s released. Seeps from the air conditioning in a fine mist, catching the projector like dust in a streetlight. Citrus… bitter… not bad. Then more. Dozens of them. Each heralded by white subtitles splayed across the screen. Each welcomed with a groan. Jasmine, soy sauce, tiger, grass, pine. They combine into one big stink; a cinematic Dutch oven.

Pinched noses; scrunched brows. Pencils already scratching. “Strong enough to give a bloodhound a headache,” declares Time.

AromaRama was its name. The first “smellie” ever commercially released.

Not the last. A few weeks later, Scent of Mystery premieres, starring Casablanca veteran Peter Lorre.

AromaRama was a gimmick. Scent of Mystery uses a different technology. Smell-O-Vision is supposed to be the real deal.

Its mogul backer, Mike Todd Jr, pulls out all the stops. LP soundtrack; limited edition perfume; paperback edition; publicity stills. Elizabeth Taylor is flown out to demo the tech to eager studio executives. A defence contractor is tapped to manufacture hundreds more machines.

The film begins. One by one, thirty smells are released with a distracting hiss. A hint of brandy floats through the theatre as a character sips his coffee. Someone slips in a busy market; the scent of banana skin identifies the culprit.

Time offers a faint whiff of praise. “At least [the smells] don’t stink so loud” as the toxic fumes of AromaRama. It’s a Pyrrhic victory. The smelly winter is over. Neither technology would be commercially used again.¹

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II. Viva La Revolución

Something else lingered in the late 1950s Hollywood air. The smellies were just the latest desperate salvo in what was fast becoming an all-out war.

The defenders: the behemothic movie studios who had dominated American entertainment since the 1920s.

The aggressor: television.

The small screen had threatened to come for movies ever since the 1920s. War and depression had held it at bay. No longer. Television spent the 1950s mercilessly encroaching on cinema’s turf.2 The result: thousands of theatres in the red, with thousands more barely in the black.

Not since the introduction of sound had cinema faced such a threat. If any Tom, Dick or Harry could flip the box on from their couch, why would anyone pay their hard-earned money to go to the cinema?

Samuel Goldwyn (as in the “G” in “MGM”) saw the writing on the wall.3 “The thoroughgoing change which sound brought to picture making will be fully matched by the revolutionary effects […] of television upon motion pictures,” he declared in 1949. “I predict that within just a few years a great many Hollywood producers, directors, writers, and actors who are still coasting on reputations built up in the past are going to wonder what hit them.”4

By the late 1950s, the movie industry had spent nearly a decade scrambling for the silver bullet that would stop television in its tracks. The smellies were just the latest misfire. A few years previously, major studios had launched ambitious 3D projects, culminating in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder in 1954. The movie was a triumph; the technology…less so. By 1955, the 3D experiment had been abandoned.

Goldwyn was right. Television was revolutionary. American theatre attendance never returned to its pre-war peak. The studio system collapsed, ending the careers of hundreds of establishment figures who’d grown comfortable in the ancien régime. Movies changed, perhaps irreversibly.

But reports of cinema’s death were greatly exaggerated. The smellies were a wet fart of a response. But they weren’t the only response. Movies found new ways to combat, ally with, and learn from their cocky young rival.

Far from killing the movies, television caused a shockwave of technical, formal, stylistic, production and marketing innovations that endure to this day. These were complicated, diffuse and unpredictable. Some were positive; others weren’t. But none were terminal. Cinema endured. There was life in the old dog yet.

III. Yes, Size Matters

It didn’t take long. Within a couple of years of television’s rude arrival, cigarette-chomping Hollywood executives had arrived at a consensus.

Thanks to television, routine fare no longer cut the mustard. Audiences “will no longer buy tickets at the theater, except to see the very highest form of entertainment,” declared the vice president of Paramount. “Far superior to what they can see on television free.”5

Movies needed to Go Big or Go Home. Like any suitor whose pride is under threat, Hollywood set out to expose the cocky young upstart for the fraud it was: convenient, maybe, but sorely lacking the goods in the trouser department.

3D and the smellies backfired. But these were small experiments. Meanwhile, studios were rolling out their big guns.

First, image size. By the 1940s, the industry had settled on the boxy “Academy” aspect ratio of 1.37:1.

Like an annoying little brother wearing his older sibling’s hoodie, television stole that ratio and made it its own. So, the big brother changed styles.6 Goodbye box, hello rectangle. In 1953, 20^th Century Fox debuted its CinemaScope technology, whose ratio was a glorious 2.35:1:

Widescreen had arrived. Over the coming years, many studios either rented CinemaScope or explored competitors, marketed with confusingly similar names like Cinemiracle, Cinerama and VistaVision (used in two magnum opuses: Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956)).7

Some filmmakers despaired. “The long and narrow frame is only good for filming snakes and funerals,” deplored Fritz Lang. Close-ups had long been relied on to showcase emotion and beautiful actors. Who wouldn’t want to see every detail of Grace Kelly’s face on a 20-foot-high screen?

Now, this weapon was firing blanks. In widescreen, the conventional close-up left a distracting space on either side of the subject’s face. Even worse: early widescreen technologies were anamorphic. The edges of subjects’ faces were distorted and stretched, an effect tastefully known as “the mumps.”

Many responded by reviving an old silent era trick of “clothesline” compositions: arranging actors horizontally across the frame.

It was a pretty bland strategy. These early clothesline movies ended up looking shallow, unimaginative. “I don’t know how to direct people in a row,” complained one director. “Nobody stands in rows!”8

By the mid-1960s, these teething pains evaporated. Anamorphic lenses were toast. The non-anamorphic, less distorted Panavision (also 2.35:1) had emerged as the industry standard. Clothesline composition was sent back to the depths from whence it came. Widescreen’s victory was total. 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 ratios became the norm.

Ford’s desert; Kubrick’s space; Cameron’s sea. Thanks to television, the great vistas of cinema were born.

Image size wasn’t the only thing getting an upgrade. In 1939, The Wizard of Oz had wowed audiences by piercing Kansas’ monochrome drudgery with the glorious technicolour of Oz. But market and technological forces had conspired to keep colour movies rare in the years that followed.

That all changed in the early 1950s, when Eastman introduced a less vibrant, less detailed, but easier to process alternative to Technicolor, imaginatively named Eastmancolor. Now, more movies could show off all colours of the ‘bow and stick one up to television in the process.

While widescreen remained a competitive advantage for cinema, the small screen quickly adapted to the threat of colour. By the early 1960s, television and cinema weren’t simple enemies anymore. Even as the studios bemoaned television’s impact, they gorged themselves on the young upstart’s cash by selling their libraries for syndication. These devil’s bargains were profitable, with Warner Bros chalking up $21 million by selling its entire pre-1950 library to Associated Artists Productions in 1956.

So, when colour televisions hit the market in the 1960s, networks weren’t interested in dusty old black and white movies. They wanted the real deal: full-throated colour bonanzas. Studios became even more incentivised to shoot in colour, to preserve that sweet, sweet resale value. What had started as a middle finger to television quickly became a way to keep it on side.

Confronted by the tube, movies got wider. They got more colourful. They even got louder, with more theatres introducing stereophonic sound.

Television was small. Poxy. Pathetic. Now, movies became the opposite. Studios wanted to show off their shiny new toys. Dramas and intimate romances were out. Big-budget epics and musicals were in.

Through the 1950s and early 1960s, studios released fewer, more expensive films, like Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), which was shot in VistaVision with colour by Technicolor. Billed as “the greatest event in motion picture history,” it made $122 million off a $13 million budget.

Increasingly, movies were a hits business. That delicious, warm, oozy middle of medium-budget programmers - the type of fare that thrived in the Good Old Days - was being spooned out. Blockbusters became the defining studio product.

The middle was up for grabs.

IV. Boobs to the Rescue

American cinema had been in crisis before. Back in the 1930s, the Great Depression had taken a sledgehammer to the industry, forcing it to take desperate measures to stay afloat.

Cue: the double bill. Patrons were now treated to three hours of entertainment: the main feature, an 80-minute ‘B’ feature, plus bells and whistles like news reports, cartoons and trailers. A smart solution. Attendees got more bang for their buck and theatres, thanks to regular intermissions, earned a tidy sum from all the greasy paws at the popcorn stand.

The success of this model caused an explosion in demand for ‘B’ movies to package alongside the main feature. The studios responded by setting up specialised units to churn out cheaper, less prestigious fare with lesser-known actors and shonkier production values.9

By the mid-1950s, this model was on its knees. Since television had strutted onto the scene, and Go Big or Go Home had taken effect, cheap and cheerful B-movies weren’t cool anymore. Even worse: a 1948 antitrust ruling prohibited studios from block booking and owning theatres, robbing them of a guaranteed way to ship this product.10

The appeal of low-budget production disintegrated. Thousands of rural and suburban theatres were left in the lurch. With fewer movies being made, and big-budget films spending longer playing first-run engagements in large urban cinemas, they were thirsty for product that the studios were no longer providing.

Which meant… **OPPORTUNITY**

Television forced studios to cede the low-budget field. Several independent companies and filmmakers emerged to fill the gap. Some were unsuccessful, like Ed Wood, whose attempt to dive into these newly open waters was a critical and commercial bellyflop.

Others were triumphant. None more so than the King of the Bs himself: Roger Corman, who spent his long career churning out low-budget, profitable films.

Recycled sets; cheap rubber suits; a skeletal crew: Corman used every trick in the book to cut costs. For Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954) he operated as producer, grip, driver and director, making $185k from a $12k budget.11

His films weren’t good, but they were quick, cheap and made money: in 1956 and 1957 alone he directed or produced twelve (yes, twelve) movies, all of which turned a profit.

Corman’s partner in crime: American International Pictures (AIP). Founded in 1954, AIP was one of the great success stories of postwar American cinema, grinding out product at an astonishing rate.

Television primed the market for AIP’s emergence. Drive-in theatres exploded from a few hundred in 1947 to over 4,000 by 1957, their carnivalesque atmosphere a welcome diversion from the living-room drudgery of the small screen.12 They proved eager buyers for the high-concept, low-execution and unapologetically titillating style that was fast becoming AIP’s bread and butter.

The new studio’s powerbrokers had realised something. Watching television with the parents was agony for America’s newly empowered youth. While the oldies decayed on the couch, AIP put all its energies into producing movies designed to entice “the gum-chewing, hamburger munching adolescent.”13 Their method: cash in on the lurid material never shown on television: breasts, booze, drugs and blood.

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William Castle was never that interested in breasts, booze or drugs, but he more than made up for it in blood. In 1958, he released Macabre, a vanilla horror film sold on a genius gimmick: Lloyd’s of London insured anyone who saw it for $1,000 against death by fright. It was a triumph. Macabre made $5m on a $100k budget.

A string of marketing coups followed. Electric shocks delivered to the audience (The Tingler, 1959). A glow-in-the-dark skeleton plunging from the ceiling (House on Haunted Hill, 1959). A Fright Break where cowards could claim a refund if they were too scared (Homicidal, 1961). One man’s flair for the dramatic achieved what the smellies couldn’t: lured audiences away from their televisions by eventising the movies.

As indies parked their tanks on the studios’ lawns, foreign countries began to take note.

During Hollywood’s golden era, countries around the globe had been mainlining American product. Now, thanks to Go Big or Go Home, there was less of it.

National cinemas emerged worldwide. In the 1950s, Burma, Pakistan, South Korea and the Philippines produced more films annually than most European countries. Egyptian films blossomed. Hong Kong produced 250 feature films in 1962, more than the US & Britain combined. The French and Italians developed film festivals and export sales organisations to ship their product overseas. By weakening the American movie business, television had exploded cinema as a global artform.14

A reminder of the story so far. Movies go big to fight television. They leave a gap in low-budget production. A new wave of indie filmmakers and companies gladly step in.

But were many of the resulting movies any good? Well… not particularly. 15 There were some highlights, including Roger Corman’s critically acclaimed run of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations. But there was a lot of shlock. Horny 19-year-olds tend to have different aesthetic standards.

Still, who said boobs and monsters can’t be influential. The preoccupations of the 1950s and 1960s indie wave: monsters, space, action and sex, percolated into the mainstream, even as the more salacious edges were sanded off.

By the 1980s, high concept, genre-oriented spectacle had become synonymous with “blockbuster.” “What was Jaws,” asked one executive, “but an old Corman monster-from-the-deep flick—plus about $ 12 million more for production and advertising?”16

Beyond genre, the modern blockbuster model Jaws kickstarted in 1975 was built on the marketing and distribution methods that AIP and others had spent years refining. These included opening in many theatres at once, targeting specialised audiences (backed by ruthless audience testing), a concept-rather-than-script-first development process, summer releases, and relentless television advertising.

Modern Hollywood borrowed more than monsters and marketing from the 1960s independents. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Fisk, James Cameron, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, Sylvester Stallone, Gale Anne Hurd, Bill Paxton, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdonavich, John Sayles, Robert De Niro, Peter Fonda, and dozens others got their starts under Roger Corman, churning out the low-budget, low-risk product that television had opened the market for.

But Corman wasn’t the only talent farm in town…

V. Hatching the Golden Geese

“Remember, men, we are not doing GONE WITH THE WIND!”

So began George Justin’s message to the cast and crew.

“We are doing a very fine, sensitive, beautiful, highly dramatic, VERY LOW BUDGET picture. Let’s get in there and knock off lots of scenes today.”17

It was 1956, and the film was 12 Angry Men. Justin, the production supervisor, had been tasked with keeping the shoestring production on track and under budget.

From conception to talent to execution, the movie would not have happened if it weren’t for television. The story first debuted as a live production on CBS. Now, it was moving to the big leagues. Behind the camera: Sidney Lumet, only 32, who had also cut his teeth on the small screen, rattling off ten rehearsals and two live performances per week for the two shows under his command (You Are There and Danger).

To 12 Angry Men, Lumet brought the no-nonsense production methods he’d sharpened in television: relentless rehearsals, detailed shot diagrams, hand-drawn blueprints and alphabetical setup guides. He completed the film on schedule and under budget.

Discipline. Lumet had it in abundance. But he borrowed more than good planning from the tube. 12 Angry Men’s aesthetic - naturalistic, character-driven, confined and dialogue-heavy – was forged in the relentless production cycles of television.

A wave of small-scale, character-driven dramas shaped by television washed across American screens in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with directors like Delbert Mann (Middle of the Night, 1959), Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker, 1962), John Frankenheimer (Birdman of Alcatraz, 1962 ) and Martin Ritt (Edge of the City, 1957) getting their starts on the small screen.18

The naturalism of television bled into acting styles, too. While the mumbling intensity of the Method had its roots in Stanislavski and Strasberg, it was through intimate, live anthology series like Studio One and Playhouse 90 that it entered the American mainstream, offering opportunities for actors like Paul Newman and James Dean to flex their emotional authenticity.

Television was the incubator for all kinds of golden geese. Hundreds of film actors, directors and below-the-line craftsmen were hatched in the warm comfort of the small screen.

Few professions benefited more than cinematography. In the old days, becoming a cameraman was a painfully incremental process of apprenticeships and obedient adherence to studio hierarchies. Now, thanks to television, the old hierarchies collapsed as demand for new talent skyrocketed.

Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven, Kramer vs. Kramer) churned out newsreels in Cuba and school television in France. Bill Butler (The Conversation, Jaws) helped construct one of the first commercial TV stations (WGN, Chicago). Billy Fraker (Bullitt, Looking for Mr. Goodbar) worked as a loader on the Lone Ranger. Billy Williams (Sunday Bloody Sunday, Gandhi) got his start in commercials. A generation of hungry, inventive young cinematographers was born.19

This young, iconoclastic new wave of talent brought a new set of tricks to the party…

VI. Direct and Dirty

Ah, the Good Old Days.

Once, visual nonfiction had been subject to the whims of the studios, the government, and other large organisations who could afford to wield a camera. Video news was confined to short newsreels planted between theatrical double bills. And the long-form documentary was largely a Morally Appropriate™ informational tool, with confrontational fare never really finding a home on the big screen.

Then came television. Thanks to TV news, cinemas lost interest in newsreels. And the small screen proved a new market for intrepid long-form documentaries. As lightweight, portable 16mm cameras and sync-sound recording emerged, cinema could take to the streets like never before.

The result: Direct Cinema (and its French cousin, the sexier-sounding cinema verité).20 A new visual language emerged: street-level, subjective, and gritty.

In documentaries, this unlocked new perspectives. Narratives could now be retrofitted from hundreds of hours of fly-on-the-wall footage, from the gritty urban reality of Shirley Clarke (The Cool World (1963)), to the behind-the-curtain portrayals of Bob Dylan (Don’t Look Back (1967), D.A Pennebaker) and the Rolling Stones (Gimme Shelter (1970), Maysles Brothers).

But the new aesthetic bled into fiction, too. Street-level perspectives emerged, as filmmakers like John Cassavetes, Arthur Penn and cinematographer Haskell Wexler pierced the romanticism of classical Hollywood with a dirtier documentary aesthetic.

By the late 1960s, the timebombs that television had planted under Hollywood were ready to explode. A wave of young, independent talent, armed with gritty, urban aesthetics and a freshly grounded acting style could target newly empowered youth audiences while the slow-moving and crumbling studio system was left gasping in the wreckage.

When The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider (1969) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) captured audiences across the country, the New Hollywood was born.

In the 1970s, a new canon of American cinema emerged, including The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Dog Day Afternoon, Raging Bull, Badlands, Chinatown, The French Connection and dozens more.21

This was the funhouse mirror inversion of Go Big or Go Home. In the 1950s, studios had responded to television by emphasising scale and moral clarity. Now, the proponents of New Hollywood did the opposite, substituting scale (with some exceptions) for style, sex and moral sophistication.

Gritty realism wasn’t the only way that New Hollywood cinematographers stood out from the small screen.

Zoom lenses were nothing new, but the arrival of televised sports had popularised them. Filmmakers took note. Over the pond, Claude LeLouch’s A Man and a Woman (1966) used long telephoto lenses with wide apertures for a painterly effect.22 Objects outside of focus became beautifully blurry blobs (later known as “bokeh,” which sounds vaguely inappropriate), an effect that television cameras could rarely achieve.

Now, New Hollywood directors and cinematographers like Robert Altman, Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács borrowed this aesthetic for films like McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Deer Hunter and Shampoo.

By the end of the 1970s, the New Hollywood was dead. The Jaws blockbuster model, its roots in the AIP independent scene of the 1950s and 1960s had taken hold.

What had once been a vicious rivalry between television and cinema had long since evolved into an uneasy alliance. With the emergence of VHS in the 1980s, it would blossom into a full on co-dependency.

VII. Movies Bend the Knee

Cash; dollar; skrilla; dough. Television, and the VHS market it enabled, became far too lucrative for the movie industry to resist.

Filmmakers (and the studios breathing down their necks) began to bend the knee. Conscious that their output was going to be consumed on television, they chose to “shoot and protect” their movies: confining key areas of action to a safe area within the frame.23

While these films were shot in widescreen, they sacrificed the format’s potential for safer, more limited compositions that wouldn’t be ruined on the small screen. Singles and over-the-shoulder shots became more popular.

Meanwhile, the concerns of Goldwyn - how could movies keep people interested in an age of television - had never really left. With 1,000 other distractions at home, filmmakers needed to find ways to distract viewers from hanging up the washing or feeding the cat.

The easiest solution was to cut more. More cutting = more stuff happening for our greedy little eyes. Yum yum yum. Average shot lengths plummeted.

While shot lengths plummeted, close-ups were back with a vengeance.

Early concerns about empty space were long gone. Thanks to Sergio Leone and the 1960s, the polarity between extreme facial close-ups and wide shots entered cinematic vernacular.

But the aesthetic appeal of the close-up had a more practical purpose. Close-ups were way easier to parse on smaller screens. “It’s a shame that most films rely so much on tight close-ups all the time,” said one cinematographer in 1995. “The style is really just a result of what producers want for video release.”24

The style that David Bordwell calls “intensified continuity” emerged, defined by fast-cutting, close-ups, a moving camera and polarised lens lengths.

Cinema had once responded to television by becoming more cinematic. Now, it was becoming more televisual.

VIII. The Revolution Was Televised

By the 2000s, the battle of the smellies was ancient history.

Films had become more televisual. Serialised storytelling, pop soundtracks zooming cameras, rapid-cutting, soft focus and complex multipart ensemble narratives were as common on the big screen as they were on MTV.

Meanwhile, television was increasingly cinematic, boasting higher production values, A-grade talent and the type of moral complexity once reserved for the cinema. It had even gone widescreen!

The downsides of modern cinema are well documented. The art of blocking – actors moving in and out the frame, in depth – feels all but lost. After a brief revival in the 1990s, the mature intelligent blockbuster model has been replaced by Corman on steroids. Theatre attendances continue to plummet.

The story isn’t over. The old enemies are once again taking to the battlefield. Once again, reports of cinema’s death are abundant. Television is a greedy little fucker. The uneasy alliance it reached with cinema wasn’t enough. In the last five years it has gone for the jugular. Streaming.

Reports that Netflix will be purchasing Warner Bros. have triggered a fresh wave of handwringing. With box office revenues crumbling and studios consolidating, the It’s So Over crowd is in the ascendance. It’s 1949 all over again.

But if we’ve learned one thing from the last 70 years (and several thousand words), it’s that the effects of streaming are likely to be far more diffuse, unpredictable and diverse than we realise. Television gave us the New Hollywood, direct cinema, independent film, the high-concept blockbuster, the burgeoning of world cinema, widescreen, colour cinematography and a talent-tsunami.

Few who feared that television would kill movies could have predicted these long-term effects; fewer still would try to claim that cinema would be better off without them.

Back in 1949, Samuel Goldwyn had warned that television would lead to a revolution. He was right. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

If you’ve enjoyed my work and would like to support it, please consider subscribing or buying me a ‘coffee.’ If you haven’t enjoyed it, what are you still doing here! Go outside!

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It’s December, which means all Substack writers must share a year-end listicle or else they will be ritualistically disembowelled by a pack of rabid wolves.

I’ve filtered this list through the slightly arbitrary criteria of the books that ‘most changed how I think about movies,’ before breaking that rule for a bonus fiction recommendation (because why no…

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It’s 1975. François Truffaut is back. The Story of Adèle H, his bracing portrait of doomed obsession, is a triumph, earning glowing reviews and an Academy Award nomination for star Isabelle Adjani. Oh, and it turns a small but tidy profit for its US distributor, New World Pictures. Job done.

It’s 1975. Cirio H. Santiago’s Cover Girl Models arrives with a…

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See if you can guess the scene.

The wails of a distress signal slice the silence. They land, a slow descent into the abyss. Astronauts venture through the haze. The atmosphere drips with dread.

An enormous vessel looms. Abandoned. Alien. They creep through the cold corridors of the derelict ship. Strange devices jut out like broken bones. Shadows reign.

Th…

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Roger specialized in elevating exploitation. And starting with what other people in that world—the Arkoffs and others—would have been happy to leave as pure exploitation, Roger upgrades it, and is always willing to reach for something that’s smarter, and a script that’s a little better, and a writer that’s a little more interesting, and a director that’…

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Golan and Globus were on their way to the Cannes Film Festival in a couple of weeks, and hoped they could start selling their next Charles Bronson movie there. Kohner pitched them a script—for what would eventually become another Bronson classic, The Evil that Men Do (1984)—with a price tag to option it at $200,000. Cannon balked. Who needed to pay $200…

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While putting this together, I…

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What if FilmStack challenged itself to have another author list out some of their recent inspirations each day? How many days in a row could we go? How awesome would it be if we could hit 100?

If you want to sign up …

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You are nearly one month old.

When I first decided to write this letter, I figured it would be a good chance to provide you with a little wisdom. To share the answers. To let your future self know what your young(ish) father thought of the world you have been brought into.

One small problem. I don’t have any wisdom to share.

I thought fatherhood woul…

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“The influence of Communists in Hollywood is due, not to their own power, but to the unthinking carelessness of those who profess to oppose them.”

So began Ayn Rand’s 12-page pamphlet “Screen Guide for Americans,” distributed to Hollywood producers in 1947 to help them keep unintentional communist propaganda off the screen.1

These were the early days of t…

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While “accidentally” watching Below Deck last week,1 I noticed that pretty much every cutaway interview follows the same pattern. A crew member will stare down the lens with their big, baleful eyes and sweepingly declare that their (entertainingly) questionable behaviour was caused by an unresolved childhood conflict.

“My f…

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1. VIDEO GAME MOVIES SUCK. This is a mathematical statement. crunched the numbers: “movies based on video games have the worst average ratings from both critics and audiences across all sources of intellectual property.” Ouch.

2. THEY’RE HERE TO STAY. They may suck, but they’re making a shit-tonne of money. The Minecraft Movie flirted …

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The Sad Decline of our Attention Spans has been much discussed. Usually, it’s The Phone’s Fault. Or something to do with late-stage capitalism. Whatever that means.

As far as cinema is concerned, this…

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The only thing more boring than watching an unoriginal movie is hearing people moan about how there aren’t any original movies anymore. It’s false! There are original movies everywhere if you are willing to find them.

That said, it’s hard to deny that, when it comes to studio filmmaking over the last 15 years, IP-driven, derivative, big-budget pictures …

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