Bloomsbury Academic Hollywood Independent: How the Mirisch Company Changed Cinema

This volume discusses the company – and the films – which bridged the so-called classical Hollywood cinema, dominated by the major studios and their associated genres and the star system and the New Hollywood characterized by blockbusters, franchises and the Movie Brats directors: The Mirisch Company. Paul Kerr analyses these key films and performances produced by the company to shed new light on the company's role in shifting political landscapes in Hollywood films. The Mirisch Company was one of the most effective employers of the package-unit system of production, putting films together as talent packages. Films like Some Like it Hot (1959) , West Side Story (1961), and The Pink Panther (1963) were all packages (of on and off screen talent and literary, theatrical and cinematic properties) and the Mirisch Company was one of the first to develop such strategies. So whilst they helped make the names of a new generation of stars like Steve McQueen, Shirley Maclaine, Sidney Poitier, and even Jeff and Beau Bridges, as well as banking on the reputations of established ‘auteur’ filmmakers like John Ford, Anthony Mann, and especially Billy Wilder, they were also pioneers in introducing new subjects and attracting new audiences to the cinema with films about race, ethnicity and nation, gender and sexuality, youth, politics, and other hitherto controversial topics. They also bridged the gap between film and television production and between domestic audiences and the international box office. The Mirisch Company is the missing link in histories of Hollywood, bridging the gap between accounts of the studio system which dominated American cinema until 1960, and the new Hollywood which emerged in its wake in the late 1960s and early 1970s About the Author Paul Kerr is Senior Lecturer in TV Production at Middlesex University in London, UK, where he is Director of Programmes for Creative Production Industries in the Media Department. He has published in Screen, the Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, and Transnational Cinema, as well as The Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The New Statesman and in many other publications. He has worked as an independent producer, director, series editor and executive producer on dozens of documentaries and other programmes for the BBC, Channel 4, Discovery, NHK and La Cinquieme. Moving Pictures, the world cinema series he created and ran for BBC2 won the Best Arts Programme Indie Award in 1996. Since becoming an academic in 2007 Paul was Co-Investigator on a two year AHRC funded research project into the role of independent production companies in British Public Service Broadcasting.