from StarWars.com:
When people talk about blockbuster movies, inevitably Star Wars comes up as one of the most memorable cinematic slam dunks. Now, thanks to filmmaker George Lucas’s interests, fans can see the history of blockbusters (dating back to silent films) and what made circumstances perfect for a cinematic hit to happen in the first place in one impressive film history book.
George Lucas’s Blockbusting, edited by Lucy Autrey Wilson and Alex Ben Block, is a comprehensive look at 300 of the most financially and/or critically successful motion pictures of all time — many made despite seemingly insurmountable economic, cultural, and political challenges — set against the prevailing production, distribution, exhibition, marketing, and technology trends of each decade in movie business history.
StarWars.com talked with Blockbusting editor Lucy Autrey Wilson about the new book and why it’s crucial to look at the influences inside and out that turned films into blockbusters.
Why did George Lucas ask for this book to be written?
There is a misperception that movies like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) changed the movie business. Looking back over 100 years of movie history, it is clear there have always been big blockbuster films. By setting successful films against each decade’s major motion picture industry developments, George Lucas wanted to show that what has transformed the movie business is not the result of any individual film, but rather the result of technological advances and changes in production, distribution, marketing, and exhibition as well as changes in the social, political, and economic climate.
For example, breakthroughs such as sound, color and now digital; changes in studio ownership, resulting in non-filmmakers running movie companies; the emergence of multiplexes with stadium seating; and war, economic depression and more have all had an enormous impact on what kind of movies get made, what they cost, how they are distributed, viewed and even remembered.
How did you go about researching information for the book?
As a result of my experience doing motion picture accounting (in a past life at Lucasfilm) and contacts made during the editing of the first George Lucas Books title, Cinema by the Bay, I had developed a pool of knowledgeable film buffs, both within and without Lucasfilm, who provided data and helped fact-check. This talent pool grew as research for Blockbusting expanded.
Lucasfilm also has one of the best film libraries in the business and I spent a lot of time at Skywalker Ranch going through our in-house film book and periodical archives. This included the Film Daily annuals, old issues of The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, other industry publications and hundreds of books.
Alex Ben Block contributed a lot of motion picture history writing the bulk of the decade text. As Alex’s text unfolded and more statistics on the individual films became available from all contributing writers, the information was compiled in the database and compared with other top grossing and top critically successful films of the same year and decade. More information was cross-checked against such on-line websites as IMDB, Wikipedia and Boxofficemojo.com. Once the internal database started to build to a critical mass (it now includes over 2,100 films), it became more and more useful as a tool with which to check facts and augment data.
For more of this interview, read the rest of the feature here.