Introduction

As the phenomenon of the Hollywood Renaissance was underway in the late 1960s, a very different development had been taking place in the American film industry at approximately the same time. After almost 50 years of selfownership, almost all major ex-studios were in the process of becoming subsidiaries of conglomerates, ‘diversified companies with major interests in several unrelated fields’, or in the process of becoming conglomerates themselves, through a programme of aggressive diversification. Starting with Paramount, which was bought out in 1966 by Gulf & Western (a company that held interests in such fields as automobile bumpers, sugar, real estate, fertiliser, cigars and zinc), other majors were taken over by similarly diversified conglomerates: United Artists by Transamerica (1967), Warner Bros. by Kinney National Service (1969), MGM by Las Vegas hotelier and finance mogul Kirk Kerkorian (1969), while Columbia and Fox adopted the conglomerate model by diversifying further themselves, before being taken over in the 1980s by the Coca-Cola Company and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., respectively.

The repercussions of this development were far-reaching not only for the ex-studios but also for producers and distributors across the independent film spectrum. Top-rank independent production, already the majors’ preferred method of production since the 1950s, kept its hegemonic position in the conglomerate-run Hollywood cinema, especially as the ‘countercultural’ low-budget films of the New Hollywood that had met with great success in the early 1970s started faltering at the box office. The main difference between top-rank independent production pre- and post-conglomeration was a renewed emphasis on the potential of the ‘event film’ (the blockbuster) to return stratospheric profits not only from the theatrical market but also from many other profit centres that were controlled by other divisions of the same conglomerate. Led by the stunning profits of Jaws (Spielberg, 1975; produced by Zanuck/Brown Productions and Universal) and especially Star Wars (Lucas, 1977; produced by Lucasfilm and distributed by Fox), this type of independent production became representative of mainstream cinema and has remained as such to date (see Chapter 8).