ABSTRACT
When looking to define post-classical Hollywood, one could do worse than take the current American cinema's most maverick of charismatic producer-director-auteurs as example, and among his varied oeuvre, pick one of the more hybrid films. Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) was allegedly a 'commercial' and therefore less 'personal' project (in the language of auteurism), helping to restore the director's battered industry reputation after the collapse of Zoetrope and the disaster of One from the Heart (1982 1 ). But it could also be regarded as a professionally confident, shrewdly calculated and supremely self-reflexive piece of filmmaking, fully aware that it stands at the crossroads of major changes in the art and industry of Hollywood: looking back as well as forward, while staking out a ground all its own.
