The Changed Studio System
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At one time the term "movie studio" meant just that--a location where the company conducted its business, filmed its product, and performed the remainder of the tasks necessary to make a finished film. A studio may or may not also have had a distribution apparatus of its own, but it must have access to such an apparatus to get its films to the theaters. What a studio does not necessarily need today is the physical plant that once was so essential, for soundstage space can be rented and most films make use of real locales to a much greater extent and have little need of the back lot that used to be so important. The studio to be created here will require an office building of some size for the different departments, some of which can be housed in other buildings or even other parts of town when that is convenient. The studio lot, however, is not required. What differentiates the studio today from the simple production company is that the studio has a number of departments which handle the production of a film from beginning to end (including a marketing and publicity department) and divisions handling films, television, and other media to get the most out of the resources of the studio itself and its various productions. Studios today may be differentiated according to size. The large studios have a long history in Hollywood and include the so-called majors--Warner Bros., Twentieth-Century Fox, Walt Disney, Paramount Pictures, and Columbia Pictures. Metro
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outlets that may put money into theatrical production in order to have pictures for showing on cable at a later date (Rouvalis 9).
Cable became the next major market after broadcast television beginning in the 1970s. Then came home video, which pushed ahead to become probably the primary ancillary market and, in time, the tail that wagged the dog. This is because a lot of theatrical distribution and marketing today is geared less to making money in theaters--though that is always a goal and a hope--and more to making money later in home video. Over the last decade, the window between the time when a film is shown in theaters and the time when it appears on video has closed, making the lag time shorter and shorter. This has distressed exhibitors, who feel they are being used to advertise home videos while their own concerns are ignored. This trend hurt the neighborhood theaters first, theaters which were already encountering problems in an era of reduced audience size, parking problems, high rents, decaying inner city neighborhoods, and so one. Most of the nation's neighborhood theaters have gone from firstrun to secondrun because they have been pressured to change by the success of the multiscreen national chains which
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Approximate Word count = 4044
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)
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