ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 examines the company’s fortunes in the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. It starts by examining the efforts of new manager and CEO Dennis Stanfill to cut budgets and streamline operations. But the audience was responding to the expensive disaster film cycle perhaps as a way to abate increasing anxieties over the direction of industrialization. At Fox the success of The Poseidon Adventure (Neame, 1973) convinced Stanfill to provide a bigger budget for The Towering Inferno (Guillermin, 1974). Fox also responded to the increased interest in feminist politics with a cycle of women’s films ironically all helmed by men, ranging from Three Women (Altman, 1977) and The Turning Point (Ross, 1977), to An Unmarried Woman (Maszurski, 1978). But the biggest reunification of Hollywood with a large profitable audience was the release of Star Wars (Lucas, 1977). Its staggering commercial success solidified a new function of moviemaking, the creation of fictional universes spawning franchises. The auteur of Star Wars, George Lucas, moved from directing to actively producing the next two sequels. This was indicative of changing industry roles. Lucas used his revenues to improve film techniques while the studio used its profits to play stock market games, again, part of a macro-economic trend. However, the studio made one fateful technological decision. It became the first Hollywood major to release feature films into the emerging home video market. This pointed again to a future when increasingly large segments of the audience used film as home entertainment rather than as an occasion to go out. This domestication of leisure was a global phenomenon that was expanded at the beginning of the twenty-first century but which was already being facilitated by the industry wide conglomeratization of the movie studios. A key example of this was when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought Twentieth Century Fox in 1985.
