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EPICS, SPECTACLES, AND BLOCKBUSTERS: A HOLLYWOOD HISTORY Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale. Detroit: Wayne Sate University Press, 2010. 363 pp.
Since Georges Melies's rocket crashed onto a craterous lunar face in his fantasy film A Trip to the Moon (1903), a sense of the extraordinary has been synonymous with the movies. A tautological term for the fantastic has been designated to every genre of film: from a historical "feature" to a biblical "epic" or even a "spectacular" war film. Hall and Neale painstakingly explore the significance of these and other terms, why they were applied, and how they have evolved into the blockbuster concept of today.
By examining the early history of cinema, the authors demonstrate the fluidity of early definitions such as "specials," "superspecials," and "features." Size, scale, expense, length of program, star and studio involvement, and high production values became key ingredients for use of the terms "epic" and "spectacle." D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and European imports such as Quo Vadis? (1913) are cited as early examples of lavish films primarily marketed as epic or spectacular in an attempt to bring prestige and profit to the producers, distributors, and exhibitors. It was not until 1952 that the term "blockbuster" entered the public vernacular. The authors cite Variety (139) with using the term in its review of the Hollywood remake of Quo Vadis (1952). Nuggets of information such as how "blockbuster," initially used to describe a heavy bomb in World War II, became analogous to a weapon against the competition from television-and eventually became synonymous with the concept of the...