ABSTRACT
Rupert Murdoch wanted to move into American television. Chapter 8 describes his creation of the fourth American network, Fox Television. This was key in the emergence of transnational media conglomerates. All the traditional film studios became divisions of media oriented companies with other divisions typically in some combination of print, broadcasting, cable, video (DVD), music, and other media. None of these companies were localized but sought to operate in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Oceania, with residual interests in Africa and the Middle East. The News Corporation was one of the most prominent. The overt reactionary political slant of its print and cable operations had repercussions for its film and television productions which were cynical and vulgar. This was the period in Fox’s history when feature filmmaking came to overlap with television. For instance, executives in charge of the film division came from television such as Larry Gordon, and TV actors such as Bruce Willis starred in action franchises such as Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988). Other film directors such as James Cameron and John Hughes continued to adhere to older (pre-TV) Hollywood traditions, tweaked with increasing use of sophisticated computer enhanced images. The fracturing of the audience continued and Peter Cherninand Bill Mechanic responded by creating various specialty film divisions, such as Fox 2000 and Fox Searchlight. This paralleled the growth of a global audience attracted to the highest level of big-budget filmmaking, in particular to Cameron’s Titanic (1997), a huge gamble and an unprecedented success.
