It’s often said that in today’s Hollywood, the studio brass doesn’t care about movies; it cares about money. This is one of the reasons the Hollywood studios have been floundering without identities for forty years…not for lack of trying. In these major studio films, selected from the syllabus of Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, we see the studios trying to outfox their enemies, and we see their enemies looking to take them over from within. It helps that each of these movies was remarkably successful. If Hollywood is a place where success breeds imitators, we might wonder what happens when the studios attempt to imitate one another’s search for identity.

Program notes by J.D. Connor, Assistant Professor of English and American Literature and Language and Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University.