Out-of-control costs. Box office bombs that should have been foreseen. A mania for sequels at the expense of innovation. Blockbusters of ever-diminishing merit. What other industry could continue like this--and succeed as spectacularly as Hollywood has? The American movie industry's extraordinary success at home and abroad--in the face of dire threats from broadcast television and a wealth of other entertainment media that have followed--is David Waterman's focus in this book, the first full-length economic study of the movie industry in over forty years.

Combining historical and economic analysis, Hollywood's Road to Riches shows how, beginning in the 1950s, a largely predictable business has been transformed into a volatile and complex multimedia enterprise now commanding over 80 percent of the world's film business. At the same time, the book asks how the economic forces leading to this success--the forces of audience demand, technology, and high risk--have combined to change the kinds of movies Hollywood produces.

Waterman argues that the movie studios have multiplied their revenues by effectively using pay television and home video media to extract the maximum amounts that individual consumers are willing to pay to watch the same movies in different venues. Along the way, the Hollywood studios have masterfully handled piracy and other economic challenges to the multimedia system they use to distribute movies.

The author also looks ahead to what Internet file sharing and digital production and distribution technologies might mean for Hollywood's prosperity, as well as for the quality and variety of the movies it makes.

About the Author
David Waterman is Professor, Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Reviews
Hollywood's Road to Riches focuses on the details and peculiarities of the film business with a depth and breadth that no one else provides. Combining knowledge of facts and institutions with insightful economic analyses makes the book exceptional. -- Steven S. Wildman, Michigan State University
Hollywood's Road to Riches is informative, intelligent, and even entertaining. -- Michael Riordan, Columbia University
With box office returns slumping, Waterman has produced a timely study of Tinseltown's development since the end of World War II. -- Roy Liebman * Library Journal *
[Hollywood's Road to Riches] provide[s] a thorough economic account of how American film studios and their predecessors have exploited our appetite for movies over the past 60-plus years. -- David Ondaatje * Times Higher Education Supplement *
No less artful are the inspired, often Byzantine economics that have sustained the film industry for more than a century, which prove a surprisingly engrossing topic in David Waterman's Hollywood's Road to Riches. -- J. David Slocum * Playboy *



Book Information
ISBN 9780674019454
Author David Waterman
Format Hardback
Page Count 416
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press