Papers by Wyatt Phillips
The aim of this paper is the definition of a daily index representing the risk-return on investme... more The aim of this paper is the definition of a daily index representing the risk-return on investments in the American film industry. The index should be used to predict the riskiness and the expected return of movie projects at the level of the overall industry and then to determine a premium for insurance for such an investment. Such an index can inform the decision making in relation to risk but also timing. Though not currently legal in the United States, such an index may be relevant at some point in the future or in other countries for film production companies as well as venture capitalists interested in investing in one or a slate of motion picture productions or more broadly in the holdings of a media conglomerate, an exhibition chain, or some other aspect of the media landscape.
Genre
Aesthetic histories of the stag film tend to place it in a straightforward lineage of pornographi... more Aesthetic histories of the stag film tend to place it in a straightforward lineage of pornographic imagery such that the film genre emerges more or less fully formed. Discursive histories, however, have noted that the term does not concretize in relation to the film form until approximately 1930. Yet this marks only the beginning of generic stability and thus overlooks the mechanisms of genrification that played out in America in the previous decades and that propelled the terminological transformation of “films for smoking concerts,” “club films,” and “blue” movies into “stags.” Approaching the films as new media in their historical moment and focusing specifically on exhibition contexts, this article places stag films in a multifaceted rather than a singular ancestry of visual culture, broadens the intertextual field of cinema beyond explicit representations of sex to trace the broader composition of male-dominated viewing traditions, and finally, argues that the genre becomes ultimately concentrated into the familiar gendered, alternative viewing spaces of stags as a function of both the increasing moral restrictions and the industrial reorganization of Hollywood cinema. Studying the films and genres on the margins, such as stags, helps us more precisely assess the shape of the center and the forces responsible for determining the boundaries between the two. Finally, this investigation of stags demonstrates the importance of the dispositive, or reception context, as a critical piece of generic development, one that is given little attention in the study of most other film genres.
Journal of Popular Television, 2018
A number of mid-1960s prime-time television programmes such as Batman (1966–69) and The Monkees (... more A number of mid-1960s prime-time television programmes such as Batman (1966–69) and The Monkees (1966–68) seemed to not just allow, but encourage viewing practices that transcended the infantilized conceptualization of that era’s television audiences. This article argues such programmes constitute a significant and unhistoricized set of predecessors to contemporary Cult TV. Analysing audience interpretive practices and the set of textual characteristics that facilitated and encouraged such participatory and interpretive activities, we also identify a relatively cohesive group of programmes, all of which premiered in that period, that we retrospectively nominate as ‘Camp TV’. These shows’ distinguishing narrative elements, namely the surreal humour of Green Acres (1965–71), satire of Get Smart (1965–70), exaggerated clichés of Batman (1966–69) and anarchic character of The Monkees appealed to a youth audience and lent themselves to multiple readings and viewing practices similar to those that would come to greater fruition with the later development of Cult TV.
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2019
The sudden proliferation of drive-in theatres in America following World War II has long been att... more The sudden proliferation of drive-in theatres in America following World War II has long been attributed to the urban exodus to the suburbs and the growth of car culture. Looking closely at David Milgram’s Boulevard Drive-in Theatre in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and his legal quest for first-run programming, this article offers a supplementary history of the political-economic landscape of the period. The result is a more complete understanding of the historical forces behind the drive-in and its sudden rise to significance. Characterised by Congressional industry-friendly laws and allocations that quietly dismantled the commercial model of the ‘whirlpool’ city, this era simultaneously witnessed a reformulation of the film industry’s long-standing exhibition model. Hollywood exhibition, supporting and supported by vertical integration, was also built on such a conceptualisation of urban organisation. After the war, however, film exhibition was taken away from the Hollywood studios by a law-interpreting judiciary that was the political obverse of their law-making contemporaries. The American drive-in movie theatre and entrepreneurs such as Milgram that drove its post-war boom were the inadvertent beneficiaries of this unique post-war political-economic dynamic that opened up a space for them in both America’s cities and its motion picture industry.
Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, 2018
Aesthetic histories of the stag film tend to place it in a straightforward lineage of pornographi... more Aesthetic histories of the stag film tend to place it in a straightforward lineage of pornographic imagery such that the film genre emerges more or less fully formed. Discursive histories, however, have noted that the term does not concretize in relation to the film form until approximately 1930. Yet this marks only the beginning of generic stability and thus overlooks the mechanisms of genrification that played out in America in the previous decades and that propelled the terminological transformation of “films for smoking concerts,” “club films,” and “blue” movies into “stags.” Approaching the films as new media in their historical moment and focusing specifically on exhibition contexts, this article places stag films in a multifaceted rather than a singular ancestry of visual culture, broadens the intertextual field of cinema beyond explicit representations of sex to trace the broader composition of male-dominated viewing traditions, and finally, argues that the genre becomes ultimately concentrated into the familiar gendered, alternative viewing spaces of stags as a function of both the increasing moral restrictions and the industrial reorganization of Hollywood cinema. Studying the films and genres on the margins, such as stags, helps us more precisely assess the shape of the center and the forces responsible for determining the boundaries between the two. Finally, this investigation of stags demonstrates the importance of the dispositive, or reception context, as a critical piece of generic development, one that is given little attention in the study of most other film genres.
The Films of Clint Eastwood: Critical Perspectives, edited by Leonard Engel and Matt Wanat (U of NM Press), 2018
This paper will perform an extended analysis of Space Cowboys and the “grandiose historical event... more This paper will perform an extended analysis of Space Cowboys and the “grandiose historical events and frontier mythology” with which the film and its protagonists are engaged. What will result is an argument for the inability of Eastwood’s aging characters to single-handedly fix the ills of contemporary America, but also for Eastwood’s ability—as representative of a certain American generation whose own bodies have begun to falter—to diagnose these ills as symptoms of a failing American body. Through his narrative agency in response to these symptoms of American decline, Eastwood’s characters and the generational wisdom and experience they embody work to indicate how such collapse might be slowed, altered, or—ideally—reversed.
Journal of Popular Television, 2018
A number of mid-1960s prime-time television programmes such as Batman (1966–69) and The Monkees (... more A number of mid-1960s prime-time television programmes such as Batman (1966–69) and The Monkees (1966–68) seemed to not just allow, but encourage viewing practices that transcended the infantilized conceptualization of that era’s television audiences. This article argues such programmes constitute a significant and unhistoricized set of predecessors to contemporary Cult TV. Analysing audience interpretive practices and the set of textual characteristics that facilitated and encouraged such participatory and interpretive activities, we also identify a rela- tively cohesive group of programmes, all of which premiered in that period, that we retrospectively nominate as ‘Camp TV’. These shows’ distinguishing narrative elements, namely the surreal humour of Green Acres (1965–71), satire of Get Smart (1965–70), exaggerated clichés of Batman (1966–69) and anarchic character of The Monkees appealed to a youth audience and lent themselves to multiple read- ings and viewing practices similar to those that would come to greater fruition with the later development of Cult TV.
Film History, 2015
Mae Huettig’s Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry: A Study of Industrial Organization... more Mae Huettig’s Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry: A Study of Industrial Organization, first published in 1944, presents an analysis of Hollywood’s mechanisms of oligopolistic control similar to the one developed by the US government during the Paramount case. Though economists from several fields had previously issued comparable research, hers was the first book to attempt to offer a more general readership such a foray into what we now call film industry studies. This essay revisits Huettig’s book and provides a close analysis of the political, economic, academic, and personal contexts within which it was researched, written, and published.
International Westerns: Re-Locating the Frontier, edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (Scarecrow Press), 2014
All Brazilians know about Buffalo Bill, Roy Rogers and Fu Manchu, but they don't know about our o... more All Brazilians know about Buffalo Bill, Roy Rogers and Fu Manchu, but they don't know about our own cangaceiros.
Adaptation Studies: New Approaches, edited by Dennis Cutchins and Christa Albrecht-Crane (Fairleigh Dickinson UP), 2010
Early Cinema and the ‘National’, edited by Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini, and Rob King (John Libbey), 2008
Dissertation by Wyatt Phillips
This dissertation explores the development of genre in American cinema from its origins to 1914. ... more This dissertation explores the development of genre in American cinema from its origins to 1914. Genre has long functioned as a structure of communication between artists and their audiences, organizing repetitions and variations among cultural products, but the Second Industrial Revolution, in the latter decades of the
Book Reviews by Wyatt Phillips
Media Industries Journal , 2016
Dissertationreviews.org publishes friendly reviews of recent dissertations so the academic commun... more Dissertationreviews.org publishes friendly reviews of recent dissertations so the academic community may have access to the most recent scholarship being produced. In this 2013 dissertation, Leslie Hunter considers “the way cinema shaped the cultural practices of theatre” (p. 26). In particular, his study focuses on the plays, audiences, critical responses, performance spaces, and creative personnel of the emergent little theatre movement and especially the Provincetown Players, critically tracing the “counter-maneuvers made by theatre practitioners in reaction to the movies” (p. 1) in the years between Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Jazz Singer (1927; the first “talkie”).
Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 2011
Teaching Documents by Wyatt Phillips
The following list aggregates a number of archives and collections that possess holdings related ... more The following list aggregates a number of archives and collections that possess holdings related to turn-of-the-century American media. The research and descriptions and initial coding was performed by Texas Tech graduate students in Dr. Wyatt Phillips's Fall 2016 seminar. The original assignment asked the students to research online collections related to a range of distinct media and identify 10-15 archives per medium that possessed primary texts, ideally available online, relevant to our study of the media and entertainment landscape in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (roughly 1880-1920). Primary texts here mean both the media texts themselves (films, recorded sound, newspapers, dime novels, postcards, etc.) and discursive texts from the period that are directly addressed to such media and entertainments (trade papers, fan magazines, theater managers' records, etc.). Each collection has been briefly described and assigned 4-5 tag words for more effective searching. Researchers can search for a specific term or jump to the listings for a particular medium. While most of these archives possess resources that are available digitally and online, some require on-site visits; these are indicated in the descriptions.
Project designed and organized by Dr. Wyatt D. Phillips, assistant professor of Film & Media Studies, as a part of his Fall 2016 graduate course: ENGL 5351 Studies in Film & Literature: Media Transformation in the Late 19th Century.
Participating Students: Norah Alqabbaa, Connor Campbell, Lance Lomax, Megan Mendiola, Sarah Self-Walbrick, and Macy Skipworth.
Coding and web design: Dr. Michael J. Faris.
Conference Presentations by Wyatt Phillips
Uploads
Papers by Wyatt Phillips
Dissertation by Wyatt Phillips
Book Reviews by Wyatt Phillips
Teaching Documents by Wyatt Phillips
Project designed and organized by Dr. Wyatt D. Phillips, assistant professor of Film & Media Studies, as a part of his Fall 2016 graduate course: ENGL 5351 Studies in Film & Literature: Media Transformation in the Late 19th Century.
Participating Students: Norah Alqabbaa, Connor Campbell, Lance Lomax, Megan Mendiola, Sarah Self-Walbrick, and Macy Skipworth.
Coding and web design: Dr. Michael J. Faris.
Conference Presentations by Wyatt Phillips
Project designed and organized by Dr. Wyatt D. Phillips, assistant professor of Film & Media Studies, as a part of his Fall 2016 graduate course: ENGL 5351 Studies in Film & Literature: Media Transformation in the Late 19th Century.
Participating Students: Norah Alqabbaa, Connor Campbell, Lance Lomax, Megan Mendiola, Sarah Self-Walbrick, and Macy Skipworth.
Coding and web design: Dr. Michael J. Faris.