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This paper looks at the evolution of capabilities in the Hollywood movie industry in the aftermath of the transition from a studio era dominated by integrated hierarchies to a post-studio era dominated by flexible hub organizations supplied by networks of resource providers. Adopting a dynamic capabilities perspective we argue that two industry capabilities--mobilizing and transforming capabilities--play a crucial role in assembling and transforming resource bundles into feature films. We further argue that the transition to new organizational forms shifts the co-evolutionary process, with practices and routines that make up mobilizing capabilities changing faster and becoming more important to box office success than practices and routines that make up transforming capabilities. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 400 films split between the studio and post-studio eras. The results support our hypotheses, pointing to the influence of centralized control versus dispersed access to resources. The strategy of integrated hierarchical organizations depends on ownership of resources that reduces incentives to develop mobilizing capabilities, and increases incentives to develop transforming capabilities. The advent of new organizational forms, by contrast, increases returns to new practices and routines that mobilize resources at the expense of returns on exploring practices and routines that make up transforming capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the events that saw the death of film producer Paul Bern in the Labor Day weekend of 1932 came to be understood by various individuals in differing ways. The death of Bern, Hollywood producer and the husband of film actress Jean Harlow, was actively negotiated by both participants and spectators. Toward this end, this article will analyze a variety of texts, as material culture, texts, that provide a masking ideology, hiding or misrepresenting the internal contradictions. The positioning of this essay, of necessity, rejects any consideration of what really happened to Bern. For though the writers of the various texts discussed could easily have examined police and other records, their chief interest lay in reinforcing an image of Bern and the events surrounding his death that best suited their ideological constraints. The circumstances recounted in this paper are distant memories for the participants, most of whom penned their memories decades after that infamous Labor Day weekend. Paul Bern as crime statistic was less portentous that Paul Bern as icon of Hollywood's Depression-era social problems. For when the specter of sexuality was cast over the tragedy of his death, his life came to be interpreted as either his inability to participate in Harlow's world of frank sexuality, or his depraved bestiality in the face of her innate innocence.

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This paper describes a system of work and patterns of productivity in the Hollywood film industry. Describing the social organization of the film industry entails two primary tasks. One is to describe the administration of work activities among technical specialists. The second is to investigate empirically the organization of those work activities. We argue that because of the particular needs of filmmaking, efficiency is achieved utilizing craft methods of work administration. An analysis of longitudinal data on film specialist's productivity provides some preliminary answers to Becker's theoretical idea of the recurrent nature of work activities in the production of art works. Finally, accounting for the disproportionate work contributions among specialists, some explanations are offered based upon an analysis of the process by which coalitions of specialists are joined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies indicate Hollywood's economic and financial leadership in the movie markets from the 1910s onward. There is a shortfall in the literature concerning the analysis of the efficacy of other minor film industries. This article examines the Italian film industry in the 1990s and beginning of the twenty‐first century. The research suggests that the Italian film industry is very risky and unpredictable, but while the extreme uncertainty surrounding the business is offset by the considerable economic success that Hollywood movies achieve at the box office, as indicated by previous literature contributions, a different business scenario emerges in Italy. The value of this article is first represented by the data used—provided by the Osservatorio of Cinecittà—which is unique and has not been published before. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]