Abstract
This chapter focuses attention on the USA in the post-war decades. The period witnessed a dramatic decline in total cinema admissions and a shift in the composition and behaviour of audiences. These changes helped trigger a wider industrial upheaval which has been much discussed in academic literature. The chapter argues that an important feature of Hollywood’s response to these changes involved the production of films with a distinctively international character. As international markets became increasingly important for US filmmakers, a key challenge for the industry was the creation of hit films that could appeal to international and domestic audiences alike. By combining evidence from new and existing datasets, I show how internationally themed pictures became increasingly prominent at the US box-office as the period progressed.
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Notes
- 1.
Waterman (2005).
- 2.
- 3.
Conant (1976).
- 4.
Maltby (2003, p. 22).
- 5.
Sedgwick (2002).
- 6.
Sedgwick (2002, p. 685).
- 7.
- 8.
Goldman (1984).
- 9.
Sedgwick (2002).
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
Gomery (1986).
- 13.
Staiger (2012, p. 331).
- 14.
Sedgwick (2002).
- 15.
See also Miskell (2020).
- 16.
Quoted in Sedgwick (2002, p. 678).
- 17.
Casper (2007).
- 18.
Bordwell et al. (1985, p. 364).
- 19.
Belton (2012, pp. 355–356).
- 20.
Hall (2012).
- 21.
Maltby (2003).
- 22.
Miskell and Nicoli (2016).
- 23.
- 24.
Miskell and Li (2014).
- 25.
- 26.
Stubbs (2019).
- 27.
Sedgwick (2002).
- 28.
Quoted in Belton (2012, p. 356).
- 29.
Miskell (2016).
- 30.
De Vany (2004, pp. 1–6).
- 31.
Thompson (2017, p. 284).
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Miskell, P. (2022). Americanisation in Reverse? Hollywood Films, International Influences, and US Audiences, 1946–1965. In: Sedgwick, J. (eds) Towards a Comparative Economic History of Cinema, 1930–1970. Frontiers in Economic History . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05770-0_12
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