It makes a pleasant change to come across a book on film that treats popular cinema as something to be celebrated.  Even rarer for that book to treat its subject with intelligence.  But that’s exactly what Tom Shone’s Blockbuster does, and its subtitle How the Jaws and Jedi generation turned Hollywood into a boom-town makes its focus clear.

That orientation is refreshing.  So many books on film are sniffy about those that make money, elevating the likes of Chinatown and Cassavetes far above their worth because their stance on life is somehow more ‘realistic’ than, say, Close Encounters.  Which is sad, because as a viewer and a writer I have equal time for mainstream cinema and arthouse movies, and feel that the difference is often only in the amount of money involved in a picture, which in turn dictates casting and marketing.  Budget is not a guarantor of quality, and neither is lack of it.

Shone articulates perceptions I’d not come across before, and which mark him out as a singularly astute commentator.  He’s fascinating on the distinctions between Spielberg and Lucas, for instance, contrasting the former’s ability to conjure a certain kind of relaxed Americana in his films with the latter’s fascination with speed.  His suggestion that Lucas is all about recreating the buzz he got from souping up fast cars to whizz round town in his youth, seen directly in American Graffiti and implicit in the restlessness of everything he’s done since, accelerating narrative at the expense of character, is fascinating.

Shone is a big fan of Spielberg, portraying him as the unwitting father of the blockbuster through the unexpected success of Jaws.  The phenomenon unleashed by the film got other studios thinking about how they could rule the box office, and it wasn’t too long before a second film confirmed that all the rules had changed in the form of Star Wars.  Those two between them created the notion of the weird beast we now know as the tentpole movie, which every studio thinks they know the mad science behind, and which is an ever-bigger gamble every summer as hundreds of millions of dollars are spent making and marketing the things.

One area that’s particularly interesting in Blockbuster is Shone’s account of the top films there’ve ever been.  We’re used as consumers to reading that the latest hyped up movie has overtaken all others in securing its place at the pinnacle of money generated, and Shone’s inflation-adjusted version makes interesting reading, putting Gone With The Wind back at the top, and including a bunch of Disney animated classics too.  Next time you read someone pimping their movie as being the biggest ever, take a look at Shone’s list and see if it still stacks up.

Some of the business strategies examined make fascinating reading, too.  When Lucas finally came to deliver the first of his new Star Wars films, inspired to do so on the basis of the continued health of merchandising sales, a very canny trick was played.  Rather than book it onto every screen going, as many big films were doing, the number of cinemas showing it was restricted.  Result?  A replay of what happened first time Star Wars came around: audiences queuing to see the film, which was a rewind to what happened first time round in 1977.  Cue media coverage of the resurrected phenomenon, which helps account for the fact that the marketing budget for the Star Wars relaunch was surprisingly small: the media was gagging to tell the story anyway.

Altogether, Blockbuster is an excellent book, comprising film criticism, interviews with people who were there when it all happened, insights into the industry, and more besides.  It chronicles a fascinating period, when the megahit went from being an out-of-the-blue event to one that filmmakers thought they could scientifically engineer.  There might be some truth in that, as the success of Michael Bay’s glorious monsters demonstrates.  But just as often, those genetically modified movies turn out to be lousy and tank with audiences.  Which is reassuring, suggesting as it does that as long as receipts bear no relation to expenditure, that the business will continue to back new talent from unexpected places, in the hope that this new batch of creators has cracked the formula for box office gold.