CSB has been working for months on an exciting project with film journalist Andrew Urban of Urbancinefile. We’re interviewing film and television practitioners about their business experiences.
Our aim is to develop a deeper understanding about the history of business decision-making in film and television and to share with our audience the wisdom from the accumulated mistakes, experiments and achievements of the contributors.
John Sedgwick - biography
Dr John Sedgwick is a leading scholar on the economics of the film industry. He is an Academic Leader in the Department of Economics, Finance and International Business, London Metropolitan University.
Dr Sedgwick is the author of the book Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures (Exeter University Press, 2000), and co-editor of An Economic History of Film (Routledge, 2005). He has also published articles on the economics of film and TV in such notable journals as Economic History Review, Cinema Journal and The Journal of Cultural Economics.Audio download
Chapter 1 - The film industry: then and now - 12 minutes
- Administration, teaching and research roles at London University
- Won two fellowships to travel to Australia to capture the reach of Hollywood into the outback
- Was there an audience many miles from the production centre?
- Australian audiences highest per capita in the world in the 1930s
- The 30s and 40s were the classical period of vertically integrated studios
- Much of the research is relevant today
- Developed methodology to assess box office success using newspapers ads
- Audiences had wide choice – as they do today
- On production side, my work influenced by notion of risk taking – movies are not high risk, as long as products are grouped together, not singly
- Big budget movies now less risky than previously
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Chapter 2 - Supply and demand - 8 minutes
- In 1934, three of the top 10 films were Australian – suggests strong interest
- So I infer that issues are supply side, not demand side
- In the 30s and 40s, studios distributed widely – advanced retailing business
- We also know popularity is driven by the film itself, no other factors
- Returns averaged across slate
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Chapter 3 - Consumer choice - 6 minutes
- Consumer choices in cinema and the dynamics of expectations
- Some consumers prepared to take larger risk than others – the flipside to producers taking risks
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Chapter 4 - Audience expectations - 10 minutes
- Elements creating expectations among audiences
- Hollywood not producing homogenous range of product
- Stars are not guarantees of success – they’re risky as investment
- Big question – how to tie public money with quality?
- Movies are fundamental to the lives of many – it dwarfs all other forms of entertainment
- Movie consumption now as high as its peak in the 30s & 40s, but now on wider range of screens
- Simultaneous release on several platforms now makes sense
Video downloads
Chapter 5 - Risk and reward - 12 minutes
- I’d like to know more about risk taking
- In the 30s 40s the studio took all the risk – but postwar, this changed
- Much of the detail information about risk and reward per film is secret
- End results of Australian research will be published in due course
- We can see that the distribution of revenues across movies follows the same pattern now as it did in the 30s – in the US, UK and Australia
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