Screen Traffic

Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture

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by Charles R. Acland

Duke University Press

Due/Published October 2003, 320 pages, paper

ISBN 0822331632

In Screen Traffic, Acland examines how, since the mid-1980s, the U.S. commercial movie business has altered conceptions of moviegoing both within the industry and among audiences. He shows how studios, in their increasing reliance on revenues from international audiences and from the ancillary markets of television, videotape, DVD, and pay-per-view, have cultivated an understanding of their commodities as mutating global products. Consequently, the cultural practice of moviegoing has changed significantly, as has the place of the cinema in relation to other sites of leisure. Acland explores this transformation by investigating the generation and dissemination of a new understanding of Hollywood movies.

Through an innovative integration of film and cultural theory, and with close examination of promotional materials, entertainment news, trade publications, and economic reports, Acland presents an array of evidence for the new understanding of movies and moviegoing that has developed within popular culture and the entertainment industry. In particular, he dissects a key development: the rise of the megaplex, characterized by large auditoriums, plentiful screens, and consumer activities other than film viewing. He traces its genesis from the re-entry of studios into the movie exhibition business in 1986 through to 1998, when reports of the economic destabilization of exhibition began to surface, just as the rise of so-called "e-cinema" signaled another wave of change. Documenting the current tendency toward an accelerated cinema culture, one that appears to arrive simultaneously for everyone, everywhere, Screen Traffic unearths and critiques the corporate and cultural forces contributing to the "felt internationalism" of our global era.

"We need a book about global audiences that is smart about theory and chockful of facts. Charles R. Acland has delivered one, an incisive blend of cultural and cinema studies. Buy it, set it, plunder it!"--Toby Miller, coauthor of Global Hollywood