Further Reading
Beard, William, and Jerry White, eds.North of Ever y-
thing: English-Canadian Cinema Since 1980.Ed-
monton: University of Alberta Press, 2002. Pro-
vides critical essays on animation, black Canadian
cinema, aboriginal films, and films about AIDS,
as well as essays about directors Borsos, Cronen-
berg, and Rozema.
Leach, Jim.Film in Canada. Oxford, England: Ox-
ford University Press, 2006. Academic articles cov-
ering the history of Canada’s film industry and
specific filmmakers such as Cronenberg, Arcand,
and Egoyan. Covers a wide range of history, but
no chapters are specifically devoted to the 1980’s.
Magder, Ted.Canada’s Hollywood: The Canadian State
and Feature Films. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1993. Provides a thorough understanding
of the politics and economics behind the Cana-
dian film industry. Chapters 9 through 12 are spe-
cific to issues affecting 1980’s cinema.
Melnyk, George.One Hundred Years of Canadian Cin-
ema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Covers the first one hundred years of Canadian
film history. Good chapters on the Québécois
film industry and English Canadian filmmakers
Cronenberg and Egoyan. Chapter 8, “The Escap-
ist Seventies,” provides good background on the
tax-break era.
Julie Elliott
See also Business and the economy in Canada;
Canada and the United States; Film in the United
States.
Film in the United States
Identification Motion pictures produced by
Americans and distributed in the United States
Films in the 1980’s tended to aim for mass audience ap-
proval. Studios began to reject financial models based on
creating a steady stream of medium-budget, modest suc-
cesses, each of which appealed to a specific market segment.
Instead, they strove to create a few expensive blockbusters
that would appeal to ever yone at once. As a result, the major
studios produced formula films that sought not to challenge
or provoke, but to entertain.
During the 1980’s, the film industry expanded, as
new methods of production and exhibition and the
growth of filmmakers’ technological capabilities re-
sulted in Hollywood’s adoption of new economic
strategies. It was the domination of President Ron-
ald Reagan’s conservative ideology, however, that
most dramatically affected the majority of main-
stream motion pictures. Seeking to allay the chaotic
mood of the previous decades, most Hollywood film
reassured the American public by embracing a re-
turn to “traditional” values—meaning those thought
to characterize the nation before the 1960’s. Trou-
bling images of Vietnam, Watergate, assassinations
of national figures, and the political activisim of the
1970’s faded beneath fantastic new technologies
that aided the major film studios in targeting movie-
goers between the ages of twelve and twenty and be-
guiling them with futuristic heroic fantasies that
seemed to make the past new.Technological and Industrial Expansion The devel-
opment during the 1980’s of the videocassette re-
corder (VCR) and other methods of content distri-
bution, including direct broadcast satellites and cable
television, altered the customary production and ex-
hibition of films. Filmmakers began to abandon the
35mm feature, as they insisted that if widescreen
films were doomed to be cut for smaller screens,
there was no point in creating larger images. Some
producers, however, aimed to create films that would
fit a smaller screen when necessary but could still ex-
ploit theatrical technologies in their initial release.
For example,Top Gun(1986), directed by Tony
Scott, managed to fit both large and small screens. It
incorporated impressive widescreen cinematogra-
phy and multitrack Dolby sound that functioned in
theaters. At the same time, it was shot to ensure that
important narrative information would not be lost
when it was displayed on narrower screens, nor
would its sound quality be muddied when played
through a VCR and television. As a result,Top Gun
grossed nearly $180 million.
As the decade progressed, the majority of the stu-
dios began to sell in advance the rights to distribute
their films nontheatrically, on videocassette and ca-
ble television, for example. As a result, premium ca-
ble stations Home Box Office (HBO) and Showtime
began to finance feature films in order to gain exclu-
sive broadcast rights to those films once they left the-
aters. They also created films and specials designed
exclusively for cable television. As VCRs and cable
subscriptions became more popular, studios beganThe Eighties in America Film in the United States 369