Busted

Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Tom Shone, Simon & Shuster, 2004)

Tom Shone’s Blockbuster, which charts the rise of blockbuster filmmaking in Hollywood over nearly three decades (starting from the wild success of Jaws in 1975), echoes Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls in a number of ways. Just picking it up, you can tell the publishers must be hoping it can replicate the runaway success of Biskind’s book. It even replicates the insert of photos, each captioned with the snappiest, most appealing quotes that can be found in the text.

The most important link, however, is subject matter. Biskind’s book concluded with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas drawing an end to the “New Hollywood” era of the seventies, and Shone picks the story up at that point. Yet Blockbuster is also a reply to Biskind. For Biskind, the coming of the blockbuster was the triumph of barbarism over art: the death of good filmmaking, but Shone’s take is much more receptive to the way in which Spielberg and Lucas did things than Biskind. The beauty of his approach, however, is that he can embrace the pleasures of the blockbuster without giving up his critical faculties. Regular readers will know I’m sympathetic to the point of view Shone espouses here, but it is always a struggle to articulate a critical framework that allows appreciation of such films on their own terms, while still maintaining a distinction between art and trash.

Shone manages this difficult task beautifully. In terms of critical analysis, I found his approach much more nuanced – and certainly better written – than Biskind’s “the barbarians have taken the castle” approach. He is eloquent and evocative in his description of the early blockbusters of Lucas and Spielberg, reminding you what was great about the blockbusters of the period. Yet he is equally convincing and entertaining as he charts the gradual debasement of the form those directors pioneered. Unlike Biskind, you don’t get the feeling that the difference between the films he likes and those he doesn’t is just that he was younger when he saw the former. He is self-consciously aware of the process by which subsequent generations rewrite the canon: late in the book he admits that “the audiences who trot out of Spider-Man seem content enough, and doubtless one of them will one day write a book rubbishing this one, pointing out what a bunch of bores we first-generation blockbuster fans are, still banging on about Raiders of the Lost Ark after all these years.” He may well be right, but he is sufficiently rigorous in his approach that whoever tries to do so will need to be thoughtful and convincing if they are to debunk this analysis.

The comparison with Biskind does, however, also highlight the book’s main weakness. Easy Riders was spectacularly entertaining as muckraking history, and problematic as criticism; Blockbuster succeeds as criticism but doesn’t work nearly as well as a historical account. The accounts of the time are supported by some original interviews, but there isn’t anywhere near the depth of reporting that Biskind undertook. As such, its stories of the production of various movies often appears sketchy, and are familiar from other sources: nearly every anecdote about the making of Batman, for example, seems to have come from Nacy Griffin and Kim Masters book Hit & Run. He would have been better off sticking to a purely critical approach more in the vein of Ryan Gilbey’s It Don’t Worry Me to avoid diluting his best material with reheated Hollywood gossip.