Facing an economic crisis in the 1980s, the Hollywood industry moved boldly to control the ancillary markets of videotape, video disk, pay-cable and pay-per-view, and the major studios found themselves targeted for acquisition by global media and communications companies. This volume examines the decade's transformation that took Hollywood from the production of theatrical film to media software.

Some of the films discussed in this volume include:

Platoon

Do the Right Thing

Blue Velvet

Diner

E.T.

Batman

Body Heat

Stephen Prince is Professor of Communication Studies at Virginia Tech. His books include The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa (1999); Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (1998); and Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Films (1992).

"Prince's book pushes us to reconceptualize the interactions of economics and ideology…. It evokes and invokes the richness of filmmaking practices--both mainstream and alternative--even as it gives a harsh and perhaps tragic image of a cultural form, the cinema, losing its specificity and even identity in the vast synergistic networks of control at the end of the twentieth century."—Dana Polan, Film Quarterly

"Prince resists standard views of the period as one dominated by the blockbuster mentality of Lucas and Spielberg and by the ideology of the Reagan administration. He argues that 1980s Hollywood was not monolithic but diverse. During the 1980s, the film industry reinvented itself to accommodate the new 'delivery systems' of cable and home video. Corporate conglomeration of the 1970s went in reverse as corporations restructured."—Choice

"Stephen Prince's A New Pot of Gold is good at sustaining a coherent historical narrative and critical commentary on the 1980s--a period when video and film grew closer together, and when Hollywood came under the control of global capitalism."—James O. Naremore, author of Acting in the Cinema