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The name Edward Jay Epstein might ring a bell as the author of Inquest, a 1966 tracing of Oswald’s footprints prior to the JFK assassination. After reading his The Hollywood Economist 2.0: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies published 49 years later, I am left with the feeling that he has uncovered a more serious if less violent crime: the degradation of American film by an industry much more committed to the bottom line than culture.
While I have written over the years about how commerce trumps art, including for CounterPunch and Class, Race and Corporate Power , I now understand the nuts and bolts behind commerce’s triumph. Epstein describes in meticulous detail that would make a CPA envious exactly how we have descended from “Citizen Kane” to films such as “Transformers” shown at multiplexes. Ironically, it was the latter day versions of William Randolph Hearst—the inspiration for Charles Foster Kane—who transformed the film industry into what it is today, a globalized behemoth that not only churns out films geared to children and teens but one that appeals to their basest instincts, the equivalent in some ways of selling crack cocaine to high schoolers.
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/19/the-economics-of-hollywood/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
